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Poker content and news aggregators

Posted Thu, 10/29/2009 - 11:45

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One of the latest web 2.0 trends is content aggregators. They select some particular online resources and expose their RSS information sorted by particular topics. In other words, you can see the best RSS feeds from trustworthy news sources and blogs about jobs, cars, fashion, music, even Lady Gaga and of course poker and gambling. The online resources are selected by editors, therefore no useless information gets through.

Content aggregators help high quality blogs and websites distribute their content (mainly news and blogs). Some of the aggregators are SEO friendly, so staying there longer can impact the search engine results as they usually have quite good Google positions. Traffic details may also indicate good quality, as feeds are usually displayed in the related information page (not like StumbleUpon with its accidental traffic).

Let’s see what aggregation services can be used for information about poker. Of course the content quality should be something like Cardplayer or Pokernews because the editors will not allow some spammy blogs or press release-like news. The feed must be constantly updated. Every service has its own content quality policy, so please read the FAQ’s before you submit.

So what are the best News aggregators except Google News, which is extremely complicated to get into?

The most popular and respectable content aggregator is AllTop.com. It provides only high-quality poker feeds in its poker.alltop.com section. The feeds can be submitted by using a simple Submission form or by contacting the AllTop guys directly (getting in touch with Guy Kawasaki or @alltop on Twitter). Another handy AllTop feature is that the registered users can easily customize their favorite feeds and set them as their starting page in their browsers just like NetVibes.

Another similar but not so well-known news aggregator having a separate poker section is TheDailyReviewer.com. The feed can be submitted only by the registered users. Flexible tag system allows adding one feed to different pages, for example Poker, Gambling, Casinos. Besides feeds, this service also displays random photos from poker news sources and poker blogs (mainly from the LasVegasVegas.com photo gallery).

The news aggregation giant Topix.com has also got a poker section where quality news articles are displayed in the Poker Wire section. The selected articles go into the main poker section and need to be really good to impress the editors. The source can be suggested by sending an email through their internal Feedback system. Of course, there's no guarantee that the source will be accepted, but the quality information providers should definitely take a shot.

And… That’s it! Pity, but we could find only 3 aggregators providing poker information. The biggest one – PopUrls.com does not have a poker or gambling section and only lists the most popular urls from the other social bookmarking sites such as Digg, NewsVine, Google News or Twitter. So make sure your news and blogs get there first.

Another aggregator – Regator.com has prevented the feed submission for unlimited time period. They now only have a very small poker section with definitely not the best of the poker blogs.

Well, we cannot finish this article with bad news, can we? There is a service called individurls.com which allow everyone to create their custom aggregator like AllTop or TheDailyReviewer by adding RSS feeds manually. So if you have a few blogs you like, you can create your own content aggregator just like we did. Take a look at the Best Poker Blog collection (please suggest what other blogs could be added to it). Very nice tool, indeed. If there would be an option of an intro text and a few design templates, the RSS market would change dramatically.

What about the ONLY poker information aggregator service? There is one called PokerWonks which collects only poker blog RSS feeds. Of course, the editor decides whether a blog is of a high quality or not. The blog can be submitted by registered users only. So far there are approximately 400 poker blogs listed; Poker 2.0 Blog is one among them.

If you know some other content aggregators we did not mention, please let us know by posting a comment.